Your pal Joe is back from a little R and R

Read a couple of great books on the beach: On Enlightenment by David Stove, and Experiments against Reality by Roger Kimball. Food for the soul, coupled with food for the belly: steamers in garlic sauce, empanadas, pies of all variety, and ice cream every day almost. Swimming for hours, boating for hours. Ice cold beer in the evening.

Great to be back, though. I hope you've all been well.

I'm glad you had a good time! Very quiet here. . .

I'm beginning to think that people may prefer the combat of the regular forums. Which is fine and all. It can be fun.

I enjoy the quiet. I bet a lot of people are outside doing summer stuff--when the weather turns, this board will be more active, is my guess.

the combat of the regular forum-although agent talking about how a priest abusing a child is worse than a teacher doing so, and THEN santimoniusly waxing on about how close a priest is to God-just begs for a reply.

I didn't post here because I was occupied with some family issues and also Vacation Bible School.

Do you run such a program? What's it like?

Vacation Bible School is something Protestant churches have been doing for what seems like forever. I understand now that Roman Catholic churches are doing it, as I did read a coment from a parishioner of a RC church in my state (I don't know the name of the church, however) who had VBS and over 200 kids attended. Our church would not have the room in Sunday school rooms to accomodate all those kids at once and probably not enough volunteers. We had 35 children, their parents needed to sign them up in advance and we had just enough volunteers. My son is now attending another one in non Denominational Church and they have 100 children.

VBS runs from 9-12 in the morning, although sometimes people do it at night. It is a theme based curriculum for kids that are 3 years old to about 6th grade, althought we cut it off at 4th grade because the older kids sometimes think it is too babyish. The Non Denominational church takes the 5th and 6th graders kids to movies and bowling and laser tag, but we don't have a bus to do that. Obviously it's tied into discipleship, but I don't know how that works out not having a child in that age group. This years theme was on the Lord's prayer and was called "Prayer Safari". The kids rotate to different areas-crafts, Bible stories, recreation, music. puppets or skit and all relate to they theme of memorizing and understanding the Lord's Prayer. It's a great way for them to learn Bible stories and memorize the Lord's prayer if they didn't already know it. Everyday we have songs so now "Say Jambo (Hello) to Jesus" and "One Basket" related to the story of the laoves and fishes. There is a different Bible story each day and it's a great way for them to become familar with Scripture and the songs reinforce the concepts.

The intenet provides resources for VBS for RC kids. I looked it up and there was one related to the Saints and another related to the Sacraments.

We don't charge anything although we had a suggested donation of $10.00 per kids.

It's a great thing, and fortunately we had a layperson lead it and she did a wonderful job. She is a SAHM, and I think apprecaited the opportunity to use her detail oriented skills as a programmer to supervise the whole thing. I just helped out everyday in the snack area.

The only problem is when people with no church background who aren't attending church use it as a cheap drop off.
That happens; You can't provent it, but it's seem a waste when kids will learn nothing about Jesus when they go home.

that VBS runs for a week, By the time it's over everyone is very tired but we feel a sense of accomplishment.
I was pleased that quite a few teens acted as co-leaders in singing and games and shephreding kids around. They did a fine job.

but at some level I suppose my wife and I were (perhaps irrationally) put off from it by the fact that we know it's borrowed from Protestantism. Lame, I know. We just think, "that's what Baptists do!" as if that's a bad thing. We could probably learn to learn from our fellow Christians a bit more. Anyway, from your description it sounds like a great thing, great fun, and I especially like the idea of bringing in the older kids as camp counselors. There's nothing quite like teaching to help you learn something yourself.

They really loved it--the older one up until about fourth grade, when it apparently became uncool. They get a little CD of songs to play at home, dress up in costumes, etc..

Attended a vacation bible school with our neighbor's son. They really enjoyed it - they learned all about Rome. It ran for a week, and the nice thing is it was in the evenings, so families could attend. Our middle daughter went last year and had a great time then, too.